“No matter who you are, you face challenges growing up,” he told THR. “You go with your things, you learn, you have to. It’s impossible to lead an honest and fulfilling life as a man and not make mistakes and ‘fess up to them when you need to. But it’s especially humiliating when they happen to be so public and so scrutinized.” Could he be talking about his downtown incident?

Zac doesn’t get into much details, but he does give us a better picture.

“I had a friend come pick me up late at night — we were looking for a place downtown to get a bite and catch up…and the car ran out of gas off the 110. It was ridiculous. We had to pull over, and I called Uber. A homeless guy, or vagrant, tapped on the driver’s-side window. Before I knew it, he [the friend] was out of the car, and they started fighting. I saw that [the homeless man] was carrying some sort of a knife, or shank, and I got out of the car to disarm him. At some point, he dropped the knife, and I got hit pretty hard in the face — and almost instantly the police were there to break up the fight.”

While that’s essentially the story we’ve heard, it’s nice to get it from him. And what about the addiction? “I was drinking a lot, way too much,” he said, also acknowledging drug use. “It’s never one specific thing. I mean, you’re in your 20s, single, going through life in Hollywood, you know? Everything is thrown at you. I wouldn’t take anything back; I needed to learn everything I did. But it was an interesting journey, to say the least.” According to the magazine, Zac now attends regular AA meetings.